In the standard works, commentaries,
encyclopaedias and monographs, wherever the historicity of the
Book of Esther is discussed, there is usually to be found some
reference to the possible extra-Biblical evidence for Mordecai.
Here is an extract from a typical encyclopaedia article in The
Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible:

Reference must be made to a single
undated cuneiform document from the Persian period, found at
Borsippa, which refers to a certain Marduka who was a Þnance
ofÞcer of some sort in the Persian court at Susa during
the reign of Xerxes I. While a connection between such an individual
and the Mordecai of the book of Esther is in no sense established,
the possibility of such a historical event as is related in Esther
cannot be dismissed out of hand./1/

Carey A. Moore, the author of the
Anchor Bible commentary on Esther, is a little more positive
about the implications of the reference to Marduka. This ofÞcial,
who 'served as an accountant on an inspection tour from Susa',
could be, he suggests, 'the biblical Mordecai because, in all
likelihood, Mordecai was an ofÞcial of the king prior to
his being invested in [Est.] 8.2 with the powers previously conferred
on Haman'. To Moore, 'at Þrst glance all of this seems
rather persuasive, if not conclusive'. While he is indeed careful
to point out the uncertainties that surround the identiÞcation
of Marduka with Mordecai, he nevertheless concludes that

since the epigraphic evidence concerning
Marduka certainly prevents us from categorically ruling out as
pure Þction the Mordecai episodes in the Book of Esther,
it is safest for us to conclude that the story of Mo[r]decai
may very well have to it a kernel of truth./2/

Robert Gordis, rather more boldly, appears to have no reservations
whatever about the identiÞcation of Mordecai with Marduka.
For him, the attestation of the names Marduka and Mrdk/3. is
'the strongest support thus far for the historical character
of the book'./4. He writes:

A Persian text dating from the last
years of Darius I or the early years of Xerxes I mentions a government
ofÞcial in Susa named Marduka, who served as an inspector
on an ofÞcial tour . . . [T]he phrase
yø¡b bÂ¡a'ar hammelekh, 'sitting in
the king's gate,' which is applied to Mordecai repeatedly in
the book, indicates his role as a judge or a minor ofÞcial
in the Persian court before his elevation to the viziership.

The conclusion to be drawn is rather
obvious:

That there were two ofÞcials
with the same name at the same time in the same place is scarcely
likely./5/

From Edwin M. Yamauchi we even gain
the impression that the identiÞcation of Marduka with Mordecai
has now become the consensus scholarly view:

Mardukâ is listed as a sipîr
('an accountant') who makes an inspection tour of Susa during
the last years of Darius or early years of Xerxes. It is Ungnad's
conviction that 'it is improbable that there were two Mardukas
serving as high ofÞcials in Susa.' He therefore concludes
that this individual is none other than Esther's uncle. This
conclusion has been widely accepted./6/

Siegfried H. Horn concurs:

The result of this disco[c]very
has been a more favorable attitude toward the historicity of
the book of Esther in recent years, as attested by several Bible
dictionaries and commentaries published during the last decade./7/

So secure is the identiÞcation
of Mordecai with Marduka in his eyes that he can even invite
us to reconstruct the personal history of Mordecai on the basis
of what we know about Marduka:

It is quite obvious that Mordecai,
before he became gatekeeper of the palace, must already have
had a history of civil service in which he had proved himself
to be a trusted ofÞcial the trusted councillor of [t]he
mighty satrap U¡tannu, whom he accompanied on his ofÞcial
journeys./8/

We ourselves are bound to ask, if
such far-reaching inferences are going to be drawn, How well-justiÞed
is the identiÞcation of Mordecai with this Marduka?

II

There is a more general question
to be raised here about what constitutes historical evidence,
in addition to a set of more particular historical questions.
In the Þrst place, it appears to be necessary to insist
that evidence for a Persian ofÞcial at Susa named Marduka,
if that is really what we have, is next to useless in any debate
about a historical Mordecai. For if on other grounds it seems
probable that the book of Esther is a romance and not a historical
record, it is quite irrelevant to the larger question of the
historicity of the writing to discover that one of its characters
bears a name attested for a historical person. Fictitious characters
usually do. While it is wise not to 'dismiss out of hand', as
Bruce T. Dahlberg puts it,/9. the possibility of such a historical
event as is related in Esther, it is not the existence of a Persian
ofÞcial named Marduka that makes it unwise. It is just
reasonable scholarly caution. Similarly, it is simply untrue
that it is the epigraphic evidence concerning Marduka that 'certainly
prevents us from categorically ruling out as pure Þction
the Mordecai episodes in the Book of Esther', as Moore claims/10/;
they may be Þction, or they may be not, but the presence
of a Marduka at the court of Xerxes, if that is really what is
attested, is not relevant-unless they are in fact the same person.
And Moore for one is not willing to identify the two persons
without serious reservations. Furthermore, it certainly does
not follow that because there was a historical Marduka it 'is
safest for us to conclude that the story of Mo[r]decai may very
well have to it a kernel of truth', since it is safer still to
follow one's best judgment about the nature of the work as a
whole. The theoretical possibility that the two names denote
the one person does not translate into a probability that the
story itself may very well have a kernel of truth. For what,
we may ask, would a kernel of truth look like? Would there be
a kernel of truth to the story if there was a Persian ofÞcial
named Mordecai at Xerxes' court, but he was not Jewish, not the
cousin of the queen, and did not become vizier? Or, what would
the signiÞcance of a 'kernel' of truth be if the kernel
was that Mordecai was a historical personage, but that there
was no threat of genocide against the Jews, and none of the remarkable
coincidences of the Book of Esther actually took place? Would
the Mordecai of the Book of Esther in that case be a historical
personage or a Þctional character? It is a nice question.
Secondly, and more importantly, the evidence of the Marduka text
needs to be re-examined. In view of their comments on the text,
it is hard to believe that many of those referring to it have
actually consulted the original publications.
The text,/11. one of the collection of cuneiform tablets formerly
in the possession of Lord Amherst of Hackney at Didlington Hall,
Norfolk, was Þrst noticed by Theophilus G. Pinches in a
communication to the Congress of Orientalists in Hamburg in 1902,/12.
though he made no reference to the ofÞcial named Marduka.
When, after Lord Amherst's death, the tablets were bought by
the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin, the Assyriologist Arthur
Ungnad noted the possible signiÞcance of the Marduka reference
for the Old Testament, and wrote a paragraph about it in an article
in the Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
for 1940­41./13. In the following volume the editor printed
some lines from a personal letter of Ungnad to him, in which
Ungnad developed a little further his view of the signiÞcance
of the reference to Marduka./14. The text of the tablet (Amherst
258) was not published during Ungnad's lifetime, but appeared,
along with six others of the 36 neo-Babylonian Amherst tablets,
in the Archiv für Orientforschung for 1959­60./15.
The facts about the tablet are these: 1. Unlike several other
tablets in the collection, no place of composition is mentioned;
but according to Ungnad, it is probably Borsippa near Babylon,/16.
as is the case with the other tablets. 2. Unlike many of the
other tablets, it bears no date; but judging from the persons
mentioned it must come from the last years of Darius I/17. or
the early years of Xerxes./ 18. Its contents are a list of payments,
both in silver and in kind, made to Persian ofÞcials and
their retainers./ 19. Among them is one Marduka, who is referred
to as the sipir of Ushtannu (line 9; in line 14 he is 'the sipir
Marduka'). While Ungnad argued that sipir meant speciÞcally
'accountant', the term (preferably to be written sep·ru
or spiru) is agreed to have simply a more general meaning of
'scribe' or 'administrative functionary'/20/; but the matter
is of little consequence for the present purpose./21/). 5. Ushtannu
is well known as the satrap of the province of Babylon and Beyond
the River (Abar Nahara)./ 22. There is a reference at the very
end of the tablet (line 26) to 'the land of Susa': 'Altogether
29 and 1/2 minas. Of which 5 minas 56 shekels the portion of
Nabu-ittannu, apart from 5 shekels of silver from the land of
Susa (mât ¡u-¡á-an-na)'.
The following assertions and inferences were made by Ungnad:
1. The Persian ofÞcials were probably in Borsippa on a
tour of inspection from the palace in Susa./ 23. It is improbable
that there should have been two high ofÞcials by the name
of Marduka in Susa./ 24. Marduka is therefore certainly (gewiss)
the Mordecai known from the Book of Esther, Esther's uncle./25.
It should be pointed out that the foregoing are nothing but assertions.
There is in fact no evidence in the text that Marduka or anyone
else had come from Susa to Borsippa, nor that there was any tour
of inspection of anything. Some silver had come from Susa, it
is true, but we have no way of knowing when, or whether it had
been brought by the persons named in the document. There are
indeed a number of Persian names in this document, but that does
not prove, or even suggest, that we are dealing here with inhabitants
of Susa rather than of Borsippa. People with Persian names are
to be found, not surprisingly, in many corners of the Persian
empire.
What is of even greater importance for the supposed identity
of Marduka with Mordecai-and the fact has not generally been
recognised-is that Marduka is some kind of ofÞcial in the
entourage of the satrap Ushtannu. Since the headquarters of the
satrap are of necessity in the principal city of his satrapy,
Marduka is, in the absence of countervailing evidence, to be
located there also. This means that what we can afÞrm with
a high degree of probability is that Marduka is not a resident
of Susa.
It is therefore incorrect to say that Marduka was an ofÞcial
in the court at Susa (Dahlberg, Horn), or was a government ofÞcial
in Susa (Gordis, Eissfeldt/26/), or was an accountant from Susa
(Berg), or to state as a fact that he came on an inspection tour
from Susa (Moore/27/), still less that he made an inspection
tour of Susa (Yamauchi) or in Susa (Gordis/28/)! And it should
not be claimed that 'the discovery of the Mardukâ tablet
has given at least Mordecai historical respectability' (Horn/29/),
since it has no relevance whatsoever to the Þgure of Mordecai
depicted in the Book of Esther.
The substantive question, whether or not there was a historical
Mordecai, is very much more difÞcult to answer than those
who have appealed to the Marduka tablet have allowed. For the
curious thing about the Book of Esther is that, although it has
all the hallmarks of a romance, with its string of coincidences,
its artfully told narrative, and its engaging characterisations,
it can at no point be unequivocally faulted on historical grounds
(which cannot, incidentally, be said in the least of the Greek
Book of Esther). Much of its historical detail can in fact be
substantiated, and the supposed errors it contains can be quite
satisfactorily explained./30. On the other hand, its story-line
is a string of improbable coincidences. Historians are compelled
in such circumstances to trust their own judgment of the kind
of literature that lies before them, in the absence of any speciÞc
data that settle the question one way or the other.